What Excel is
An Excel workbook is a zip archive of XML parts describing sheets, cells, formulas, styles and charts. The .xlsx extension is that format; .xls is the older binary one from before 2007.
Finance, operations and anyone who received a file from finance or operations.
What PDF is
PDF describes a page: glyphs at coordinates, not rows and columns. A table in a PDF is a visual arrangement, not a data structure.
Reports, invoices, statements and anything sent to be read rather than processed.
What changes when you convert Excel to PDF
Only the first sheet is read, and cells are read as the text Excel displays rather than the number underneath. That matters for dates: a cell showing 15/03/2026 arrives as that string, not as a serial number you would then have to decode.
The table is drawn into a paginated document with the header repeated on every page, so a long table stays readable past page one. Page size, orientation and font size are all adjustable.
What carries over from Excel to PDF
Excel records 4 things about a table that PDF has no way to hold.
Excel knows which of its values are numbers. PDF keeps only their appearance, so nothing downstream can sort or sum them without someone reading them back off the page first.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in PDF, so a null and an empty string in the Excel both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
Nothing in PDF records that the first row is a header. It is drawn at the top and looks like one, which is all that is left of the distinction.
PDF is the end of the line for this data. Reading the table back out of it is a separate and much harder problem than writing it, so keep the Excel if you will need the values again.